Many are the changes in deer hunting that I’ve seen in my 60 years of chasing whitetails.

The topic of hunting deer over corn seems to have a lot in common with religion. Many conflicting doctrines exist among hunters and are devoutly held and stoutly defended. Every true believer is convinced that his is the one true gospel, and that all others should be denied entrance, if not to Heaven, then at least to the record book.

No, I don’t mean the kind that makes you jump if you hear it in the grass around your feet; I mean the kind that makes big whitetail bucks run up to you and shake their racks at you.

Everybody dreams of bigger-antlered bucks on his ranch or lease. We know there are three essential elements in the big-antler equation – age, nutrition, and genetics. All are important ... but they are not equally important.

Let’s begin at the beginning. My name is John Wootters and I’ll be the author of this outdoors column for as long as it suits Publisher Clint Schroeder. I’m a native Texan, now living on Johnson Creek outside Ingram. Some of you may have heard of me.

Unlike Shangri-La, Los Cuernos wasn't a mythical paradise. It was a real place. But, sadly, the whitetail ranch near Laredo, Texas, familiar to many longtime HUNTING readers, is no more. Over the last 21 years, Los Cuernos Ranch inspired a hundred deer-related features for this magazine and a hundred more "Buck Sense" columns, plus occasional mentions by writers other than myself.

Whitetail bucks are remembered for many different reasons. Some represent a "First" or a personal best in a hunter's life. Others are memorable because of some physical characteristic, or for their legendary elusiveness.

The first vocal sound I ever heard from a whitetail deer nearly ended my deer-hunting career before it was fairly begun, and thus almost drove me to take up honest work! It came from the throat of my first whitetail buck. I was a tender 13, hunting all alone, and the eight-pointer was very close. This was good; otherwise, I'd never have hit him, given the violent case of buck fever that shook me like a seismograph needle in a high-Richter earthquake. When I was finally able to make the rifle fire, the buck went down in a heap, spine-shot... and he bawled! It was a shocking, harsh, dragged-out sound, more like a yearling than a deer, and it horrified me. I could never stand making an animal suffer, and the bawl triggered a wave of remorse and guilt–until I realized that the buck couldn't be suffering, having given up the ghost at about the moment his bawl ended.

Bucky was a tame/wild whitetail buck who, when he felt like it, inhabited my ranch on the Tex-Mex border. When he felt like it, he also inhabited at least two other adjacent ranches.

Reprinted for Houston Safari Club Hunter's Horn; Summer 2020 - After a quarter century of whitetail hunting, the author’s wife was rewarded with the buck of a lifetime. Her name is Jeannie. We called the deer “the early buck” because our only sightings of him in two seasons had been very early in the morning. Both times he’d appeared in the gray dawn near our camp house...